I think it is an error to imagine that the law school class time devoted to a particular subject needs to be proportional to the time students will spend on that subject in actual practice.Out of the mouths of full-time law school professors who never practiced or clerked at the trial level.
Maybe Prof. Siegel is sore because his Civ Pro course is "[n]ot offered" this academic year.
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he's kind of got a point. i mean, 99% of what i spent time on in law school i have never had to think about since. some of that stuff is just foundational. you need to figure out how jurisdiction works before you get out into the real world so once you get there, you don't have to waste time on each case obsessing about issues that don't matter in that particular case.
Sure, you have to teach law students "how to think like a lawyer," and it's also important to give them a sense of the (tortuous?) development of 19th-century legal thinking that brought us to where we are now. But I think there's gotta be a happy medium between spending 5 or 8 class hours on Erie and Pennoyer v. Neff, and doing nothing but rote memorization of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. It seems to me that the original post there at Concurring Opinions weighs the former way more than it should.
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